Homeward Bound

3

“Hey, son. Do you hear me?”

Jonathan Yeager heard the words, sure enough, the words and the familiar voice. At first, in the confusion of returning consciousness, the voice mattered for more. A slow smile stretched across his face, though his eyes hadn’t opened yet. “Dad,” he whispered. “Hi, Dad.”

“You made it, Jonathan,” his father said. “We made it. We’re in orbit around Home. When you wake up a little more, you can look out and see the Lizards’ planet.”

With an effort, Jonathan opened his eyes. There was his father, floating at an improbable angle. A woman in a white smock floated nearby, at an even more improbable one. “Made it,” Jonathan echoed. Then, as his wits slowly and creakily began to work, he smiled again. “Haven’t seen you in a hell of a long time, Dad.”

“Only seems like a little while to me,” his father answered. “You drove me downtown, and I woke up here.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan said, his voice still dreamy. “But I had to drive the goddamn car back, too.” He looked around. His neck worked, anyhow. “Where’s Karen?”

The woman spoke up: “She’s next on the revival schedule, Mr. Yeager. All the signs on the diagnostic monitors look optimal.”

“Good.” Jonathan discovered he could nod as well as crane his neck. “That’s good.” Tears stung his eyes. He nodded again.

“Here, have some of this.” The woman held a drinking bulb to his mouth. He sucked like a baby. It wasn’t milk, though. It was… Before he could find what that taste was, she told him: “Chicken broth goes down easy.”

It didn’t go down that easily. Swallowing took effort. Everything took effort. Of course, he’d been on ice for… how long? He didn’t need to ask, Where am I? — they’d told him that. But, “What year is this?” seemed a perfectly reasonable question, and so he asked it.

“It’s 2031,” his father answered. “If you look at it one way, you’re going to be eighty-eight toward the end of the year. Of course, if you look at it that way, I’m older than the hills, so I’d rather not.”

His father had seemed pretty old to Jonathan when he went into cold sleep. From thirty-three, which Jonathan had been then, seventy would do that. From fifty, where Jonathan was now, seventy still seemed a good age, but it wasn’t as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. I’ve done a lot of catching up with him, he realized. That’s pretty strange.

“Can I get up and have that look around?” he asked.

“If you can, you may,” the woman in the white smock answered, as precise with her grammar as Jonathan’s mother had always been.

“It’s a test,” his father added. “If you’re coordinated enough to get off the table, you’re coordinated enough to move around.”

It proved harder than Jonathan thought it would. What was that line from the Bible? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning — that was it. Both his right hand and his left seemed to have forgotten their cunning. Hell, they seemed to have forgotten what they were for.

Finally, he did manage to escape. “Whew!” he said. He hadn’t imagined a few buckles and straps could be so tough. The woman in white gave him shorts and a T-shirt to match what his father had on. He hadn’t noticed he was naked till then.

“Come on,” Sam Yeager said. “Control room is up through that hatchway.” He pushed off toward the hatchway with the accuracy of someone who’d been in space before. Come to that, Jonathan had, too. His own push wasn’t so good, but he could blame that on muscles that still didn’t want to do what they were supposed to. He not only could, he did.

Jonathan pulled himself up the handholds and into the control room. Along with his father, two officers were already in there. The leaner one eyed Jonathan, turned to the rounder one, and said, “Looks like his old man, doesn’t he?”

“Poor devil,” the rounder man… agreed?

“These refugees from a bad comedy show are Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn,” Sam Yeager said, pointing to show who was who. “They’re the glorified bus drivers who got us here.”

“Two of the glorified bus drivers,” Flynn corrected. “Our most glorified driver is presently asleep. He does that every once in a while, whether he needs to or not.”

“Stone’d be happier if he didn’t,” Johnson said. “He’d be happier if nobody did.”

He and Flynn did sound like a team. Jonathan Yeager would have been more inclined to sass them about it if he hadn’t started staring at Home. He’d seen it in videos from the Race, of course, but the difference between a video on a screen and a real world out there seeming close enough to touch was about the same as the difference between a picture of a kiss and the kiss itself.

“Wow,” Jonathan said softly.

“You took the words out of my mouth, son,” his father said.

“We’re really here,” Jonathan whispered. Hearing about it in the room where he’d revived was one thing. Seeing a living planet that wasn’t Earth, seeing it in person and up close… “Wow,” he said again.

“Yes, we’re really here,” Flynn said. “And so the Lizards have laid out the red carpet for us, because they’re so thrilled to see us at their front door.”

“Excuse me,” Johnson said, and looked down at his wrist, as if at a watch. “I think my irony detector just went off.”

“Can’t imagine why.” Flynn cocked a hand behind one ear. “Don’t you hear the brass band? I’m just glad the Race never thought of cheerleaders.”

How long had the two of them been sniping at each other? They might almost have been married. A light went on in Jonathan’s head. “You two are off the Lewis and Clark, aren’t you?”

“Who, us?” Flynn said. “I resemble that remark.”

Johnson said, “It’s the stench of Healey, that’s what it is. It clings to us wherever we go.”

“Healey?” Jonathan wondered how hard his leg was being pulled.

“Our commandant,” Mickey Flynn replied. “Renowned throughout the Solar System-and now here, too-for the sweetness of his song and the beauty of his plumage.”

“Plumage, my ass,” Johnson muttered. “We thought we’d gone light-years to get away from him-worth it, too. But turns out he came along in cold sleep, so now he’s running this ship, dammit.”

“Healey’s a martinet-one of those people who give military discipline a bad name. There are more of them than there ought to be, I’m afraid,” Sam Yeager said.

Johnson looked as if he wanted to say even more than he had, but held back. That struck Jonathan as sensible. If this Healey was as nasty as all that, he made little lists and checked them a lot more than twice. “I wonder who’s president these days,” he remarked.

“As of last radio signal, it was a woman named Joyce Peterman,” Johnson replied, with a shrug that meant the news surprised him, too. “Of course, last radio signal left more than two terms ago, so it’s somebody else by now-or if it’s not, things have really gone to hell back there.”

“As long as the radio signals keep coming, I’m happy,” Jonathan’s father said. “They could elect Mortimer Snerd, and I wouldn’t care.”

Jonathan, who’d grown up as television ousted radio, barely knew who Mortimer Snerd was. He understood what his father was talking about just the same. Radio signals from Earth to Tau Ceti meant the Lizards and the Americans-or the Russians, or the Japanese, or (since the last Nazi-Lizard war was almost seventy years past by now) even the Germans-hadn’t thrown enough missiles at one another to blast the home planet back to the Stone Age.

My kids are as old as I am now, Jonathan thought, and then he shook his head. That was wrong. If it was 2031, his kids were older than he was. In any sane universe, that should have been impossible. But then, nobody had ever shown this was a sane universe.

He looked up-or was it down? — at Home. The universe might not be sane, but it was beautiful.

“Radio signals are useful things,” Flynn said. “We let the Lizards know we were coming, so they could bake us a cake. And we let them know that if the signals from the Admiral Peary stopped coming while she was in the Tau Ceti system, we’d bake them a planet.” He paused for a precisely timed beat, and then finished, “I love subtle hints.”

“Subtle. Right.” But Jonathan knew the Lizards would be pitching a fit down there. This had been their imperial center for tens of thousands of years, the place from which they’d set out on their conquests. Now they had uninvited guests. No wonder they were jumpy.

“We’ve got one ship here,” Glen Johnson said. “One ship, against everything the Race has in space. They came at us with their goddamn conquest fleet when we were flying prop jobs. I don’t waste a lot of grief on them.”

“They didn’t even expect us to have those,” Jonathan’s father said. “They were looking for knights in shining armor. Hell, if you’ve ever seen that photo their probe took, they were looking for knights in rusty armor. If they’d found them, they might not have lost a male.”

The Race always took a long time to get ready before doing anything. That had saved mankind once. Jonathan dared hope it would work for the Admiral Peary, too. But the Lizards back home had seen they couldn’t sit around and dawdle when dealing with Big Uglies. Did the ones here also realize that? We’ll find out, he thought.

Something else occurred to him. As casually as he could, he asked his father, “Have we heard from Kassquit? Did she make it through cold sleep all right?”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact,” Sam Yeager answered with a rather sheepish grin. “Difference is, you know she went into cold sleep. I didn’t, because she went in after me. I got a jolt when I heard what had to be a human speaking the Lizards’ language and asking for Regeya.”

Jonathan laughed. The two American pilots looked blank. “Regeya?” Flynn said plaintively, while Johnson asked, “Just who is this Kassquit person, anyway? A traitor? You never did exactly explain that, Sam.”

“Regeya’s the name I used on the Lizards’ electronic network back home,” Jonathan’s father said. “And no, Kassquit’s not a traitor, not the way you mean. She’s got a right to be loyal to the other side. She was raised by the Lizards ever since she was a tiny baby.”

“You’ve met her?” Glen Johnson asked. Jonathan and his father both nodded.

“Raised by Lizards, was she?” Flynn said. The Yeagers nodded again. The pilot asked, “And how crazy is she?”

Sam Yeager looked to Jonathan, who knew her better. “Some,” Jonathan said. “Maybe more than some. But less than you’d expect. She’s very smart. I think that helped.” We did the same thing to Mickey and Donald, too, he thought. They at least had each other. Kassquit didn’t have anybody.

His father was still looking at him. He knew all the reasons Jonathan had asked about Kassquit. Oh, yes. He knew. And so would Karen.

Consciousness came back to Karen Yeager very slowly. She couldn’t tell when dreams stopped and mundane reality returned. She’d been dreaming about Jonathan and his father. Next thing she knew, she saw them. She would have accepted that as part of the dream, for they were both floating in space in front of her, and dreams were the only place where you could fly. But then she realized they weren’t flying, or not exactly, and that she was weightless, too.

“We made it,” she whispered. Her tongue felt like a bolt of flannel. It didn’t want to shape the words.

“We sure did, honey.” Jonathan had no trouble talking. For a moment, Karen resented that. Then, on hands and knees, a thought crawled through her head. Oh. He’s been awake for a while.

“How are you, Mrs. Yeager?” That brisk female voice hadn’t been part of her dream. The woman in a white smock also floated above her head.

Answer. I have to answer. “Sleepy,” Karen managed.

“Well, I’m not surprised. All your vital signs are good, though,” the woman said. “Once the drugs wear off and you get used to being normal body temperature again, you’ll do fine. I’m Dr. Blanchard, by the way.”

“That’s nice,” Karen said vaguely. She turned toward Sam Yeager. “Hello. It’s been a while.” She laughed. She felt more than a little drunk, and more than a little confused, too. “How long has it been, anyway?”

“Everybody asks that once the fog starts to clear,” Dr. Blanchard said. “It’s 2031.” She gave Karen a moment to digest that. It was going to take more than a moment. I’m almost ninety years old, Karen thought. But she didn’t feel any different from the way she had when she went into cold sleep. She looked at her father-in-law again. How old is Sam? She had trouble with the subtraction.

The woman in the smock gave her chicken soup. Swallowing proved at least as hard as talking, but she managed. She felt better with the warm broth inside. It seemed to help anchor her to the here and now.

“Can I get up?” she asked.

Jonathan and his father both started to laugh. “We both had to figure out how, and now you do, too,” Jonathan said. After some fumbling-her hands still didn’t feel as if they belonged to her-Karen managed to undo the fasteners that held her to the revival bed. Only a towel covered her. Dr. Blanchard chased the male Yeagers out of the revival room and gave her shorts and a shirt like the ones they had on. Then they were suffered to return. She pushed off toward them.

When she came up to Jonathan, he gave her a quick kiss. Then he let her go. He’d known her a long time. Had he tried for anything more than a quick kiss just then, she would have done her feeble best to disembowel him.

She saw her father-in-law watching her in a peculiar way. Sam Yeager had always noticed her as a woman. He’d never once been obnoxious about it, but he had. Now, for no reason at all, she found herself blushing. Then she shook her head, realizing it wasn’t for no reason at all. “I’ve just aged seventeen years right before your eyes, haven’t I?” she said.

“Not a bit,” he said. “You’ve aged maybe five of them.”

Karen laughed. “Did they bring the Blarney Stone along so you could kiss it while I was asleep?” She was a child-a great-grandchild, actually-of the Old Sod, even if her maiden name, Culpepper, was English.

Then Jonathan said, “Dad’s right, hon.”

She tried to poke her husband in the ribs. “You of all people really ought to know better. It’s very sweet and everything, but you ought to.”

“Nope.” He could be stubborn-now, maybe, endearingly stubborn. “Here on the Admiral Peary, he really is right. We’re weightless. Nothing sags the way it would under gravity.” He patted his own stomach by way of illustration.

“Hmm.” Karen thought that over. She didn’t have a mirror-which, right after cold sleep, was bound to be a mercy-but she could look at Jonathan and Sam. “Maybe.” That was as much as she was going to admit.

Jonathan pointed to the passageway where he and his father had gone while she dressed. “Home’s out there waiting, if you want to have a look.”

Sam Yeager added, “It’s out there waiting even if you don’t want to have a look.”

Jonathan grunted. “You’ve been listening to that Mickey Flynn too much, Dad.”

“Who’s Mickey Flynn?” Karen asked.

“One of the pilots,” her husband answered darkly.

“He’s a bad influence,” her father-in-law added. “He’s a professional bad influence, you might say. He’s proud of it. He has a dry wit.”

“Any drier and it‘d make Home look like the Amazon jungle,” Jonathan said.

“Okay,” Karen said. “Now I’m intrigued. Would I rather meet him or the Lizards’ planet?” She pushed off toward the passageway.

But Mickey Flynn wasn’t in the control room. The pilot who was, a sober-looking fellow named Walter Stone, said, “Pleased to meet you, ma‘am,” when Jonathan introduced her to him, then went back to studying his radar screen. Karen saw how many blips were on it. That still left her slightly miffed. Stone seemed to care more for machines than he did for people.

Then Karen stopped worrying about the pilot, because the sight of Home made her forget him and everything else. She knew the map of Tau Ceti 2 as well as she knew the map of Earth. Knowing and seeing were two different things. Someone softly said, “Ohh.” After a moment, she realized that was her own voice.

“That’s what I said, too, hon,” Jonathan said.

Stone looked over his shoulder. “We’ll deal with whatever they throw at us,” he said. “And if they start throwing things at us, we’ll make ’em sorry they tried.”

Karen believed the last part. The Admiral Peary was armed. A ship that went to strange places had to be. If the Lizards attacked it, it could hurt them. Deal with whatever they threw at it? Maybe Brigadier General Stone was an optimist. Maybe he thought he was reassuring her.

She didn’t feel reassured. That was what she got for knowing too much. She stared down at the golds and greens and blues-more golds, fewer greens and blues than Earth-spread out below her. “They’re the only ones who’ve ever flown into or out of this system till now,” she said. “We hadn’t even started farming when they conquered the Rabotevs.”

“And they were in space inside this system for God only knows how many thousand years before that,” Sam Yeager said. “They’ve got reasons to be antsy about strangers.”

“We’ve got reasons for coming here,” Karen said. “They gave us most of them.”

“Don’t I know it!” her father-in-law said. “I was on a train from Madison down to Decatur when they came to Earth. They shot it up. Only dumb luck they didn’t blow my head off.”

“I’m glad they didn’t,” Jonathan said. “If they had, I wouldn’t be here. And I sure wouldn’t be here. ” He pointed out toward Home.

Would I be here? Karen wondered. The Race had fascinated her ever since she was little. Even if she’d never met Jonathan, she probably would have done something involving them. Would it have been enough to get her aboard the Admiral Peary? How could she know? She couldn’t.

An enormous yawn tried to split her face in two. “That happened to me after I’d been awake for a little while,” Jonathan said. “They’ve given us a cabin for two, if you want to sleep for a bit.”

“That sounds wonderful,” Karen said.

“It’s right next to mine,” her father-in-law added. “If you leave the TV on too loud, I’ll bang my shoe against the wall.”

Brigadier General Stone looked pained. “It’s not a wall. It’s a bulkhead.” He and Sam Yeager wrangled about it, not quite seriously, as Jonathan led Karen out of the control room and back to the fluorescent-lit painted metal that was the starship’s interior.

The cabin didn’t seem big enough for one person, let alone two. When Karen saw the sleeping arrangements, she started to giggle. “Bunk beds!”

“Don’t let Stone hear you say that,” Jonathan warned. “He’ll probably tell you they’re supposed to be bulkbunks, or something.”

“I don’t care.” Karen was still giggling. “When I was a little kid, my best friend had a sister who was only a year younger than she was, and they had bunk beds. I was so jealous. You can’t believe how jealous I was.”

“They’ve got the same sort of straps on them that the revival bed did,” Jonathan said. “We won’t go floating all over the cabin.”

“I wish they’d spin the ship and give us some gravity,” Karen said. “But it would kill the guys from the Lewis and Clark, wouldn’t it?”

“Like that.” Her husband snapped his fingers. “It would screw up fire control, too. We’re stuck with being weightless till the Lizards let us go down to Home.”

Karen grimaced at the thought of fire control: a euphemism for this is how we shoot things up. The grimace turned into yet another yawn. “Dibs on the top bunk,” she said, and got into it. As she fastened herself in, a question bubbled up to the top of her mind: “Have we… lost anybody?”

“A couple of people,” Jonathan answered. “It was a little riskier than they said it would be. I suppose that figures. I’m damn glad you’re here, sweetie. And I’m glad Dad is. They really didn’t know what they were doing when they put him under.”

“I’m glad you’re here, too,” Karen said. The chill that ran through her had nothing to do with cold sleep. How sorry would certain people back on Earth have been if Sam Yeager hadn’t revived? Not very, she suspected. She also suspected she was falling asleep no matter what she could do about it. Moments later, that suspicion was confirmed.

When she woke up, she felt better. She realized how groggy she’d been before. The buckles on the bunk were just like the ones on the revival bed. Those had almost baffled her. She opened these without even thinking about it. When she pushed out of the bunk toward a handhold on the far-not very far-wall, she saw Jonathan reading in the bottom bunk. He looked up from the papers and said, “Hi, there.”

“Hi, there yourself,” Karen said. “How long was I out?”

“Just a couple of hours.” He waved papers at her. “This is stuff you’ll need to see-reports on what’s been going on back on Earth since we went under. We’ve got to be as up-to-date as the Lizards are, anyhow.”

“I’ll look at it.” Karen laughed. “It still feels like too much work.”

“Okay. I know what you mean,” Jonathan said. “I’m a day and a little bit ahead of you, and I’m still not a hundred percent, either-not even close. Still, one of these days before we go down to Home, it might be fun to try it weightless. What do you think?”

If Jonathan was chipper enough to contemplate sex, he was further ahead of Karen than he knew. What she said was, “Not tonight, Josephine.” What she thought was, Maybe not for the next six months, or at least not till all the drugs wear off.

She also almost reminded him that he’d already fooled around in space. At the last minute, she didn’t. It wasn’t so much that he would point out he hadn’t been weightless then; the Lizards’ ship had spun to give it artificial gravity. But she didn’t want him thinking about Kassquit, and about the days when he’d been young and horny all the time, any more than he had to. Yes, keeping quiet seemed a very good idea.

Sam Yeager spent as much time as he could in the Admiral Peary ’s control room. Part of that was because he couldn’t get enough of looking at Home. Part of it was because the control room wasn’t far from the revival room. He got the chance to say hello to some people he hadn’t seen for more than fifty years. That was what the calendar insisted, anyway. To him, it seemed like days or weeks. It was a matter of years to them, but not anything like fifty.

And he enjoyed the company of Glen Johnson and Mickey Flynn-and, to a lesser degree, that of Walter Stone. Stone was too much the regulation officer for Sam to feel completely comfortable around him. Such men were often necessary. Yeager knew as much. But he wasn’t one of them himself, and, as far as he was concerned, they were also often annoying. He gave no hint of that opinion any place where Stone could overhear him.

Johnson, now, Johnson was as much of a troublemaker as Sam was himself. The authorities had known as much, too. Yeager asked him, “Did you get the subtle hints that it would be a good idea for you to go into cold sleep if you wanted to have a chance to keep breathing?”

“Subtle hints?” The pilot considered. “Well, that depends on what you mean. Healey didn’t quite say, ‘You have been ordered to volunteer for this procedure.’ He didn’t quite say it, but he sure meant it. You, too, eh?”

“Oh, yes.” Sam nodded. “They looked at me and they thought, Indianapolis. I’m not sorry I’m a long way away.”

“I’ve been in Indianapolis,” Flynn said. “They should have given you a medal.”

Sam scowled and shook his head. Johnson said, “Not funny, Mickey.”

“They were people there. Everybody back in the States thought I forgot about that or didn’t care,” Sam said. “What they wouldn’t see was that the Lizards we blew up were people, too.”

“That’s it,” Johnson agreed. “I was up there on patrol when we did that. I figured it was the Reds or the Nazis, but it wasn’t. The Lizards would have got their own back against them. They had to against us, too.”

“We spent so much time and so much blood making the Race believe we were people, and deserved to be treated like people,” Yeager said. “Then we didn’t believe it about them. If that’s not a two-way street, it doesn’t work at all.”

Before either of the pilots could say anything, alarms blared. They both forgot about Sam and swung back to the instrument panels. Equipment failure? Lizard attack? No and no. The urgent voice on the intercom said what it was: “Code blue! Code blue! Dr. Kaplan to the revival room! Dr. Garvey to the revival room! Dr. Kaplan! Dr. Garvey! Code blue! Code blue!”

“Damn,” Glen Johnson said softly.

“Yeah.” Yeager nodded. When the Lizards went into cold sleep, they were all but guaranteed to come out again when revival time rolled around. As often happened when humans adopted and adapted the Race’s techniques, they made them work, but less efficiently. Sam often wondered how very lucky he was to have awakened here in orbit around Tau Ceti 2.

“Who’s getting revived now?” the pilot asked.

“I haven’t looked at the schedule for today,” Sam answered. “Do you have a copy handy?”

“I ought to, somewhere.” Johnson flipped through papers clipped together and held on a console by large rubber bands so they wouldn’t float all over the place. He found the one he wanted and went down it with his finger. Suddenly, he stopped. “Oh, shit,” he muttered.

“Who, for God’s sake?” Sam asked.

“It’s the Doctor,” Johnson said.

“Christ!” Sam exclaimed. People had been calling the diplomat the Doctor for years. He was a lucky Jew: his parents had got him out of Nazi Germany in 1938, when he was fifteen. He’d been at Harvard when the Lizards came, and spent a hitch in the Army afterwards. When the fighting ended, he’d gone back to school and earned his doctorate in nineteenth-century international relations.

He’d moved back and forth between universities and the government from that time on. Ever since Henry Cabot Lodge retired in the early 1970s, he’d been the U.S. ambassador to the Race. With his formidably intelligent face and his slow, ponderous, Germanic way of speaking, he was one of the most recognizable men on Earth. He would have been a natural to head up the first American mission to Home.

Sam wondered when the Doctor had gone into cold sleep. Probably not till just before the Admiral Peary took off. The two of them had met several times before Sam went under, and the Doctor had consulted him about the Race by telephone fairly regularly. Sam had looked forward to working with the diplomat here ever since spotting his name on the list.

He had, yes. Now… Hoping against hope, he asked, “Have they ever managed to revive anybody they’ve called a code blue on?”

Glen Johnson shook his head. “Not that I remember.”

“I didn’t think so. I was hoping you’d tell me I was wrong.”

He wondered if he ought to pull himself down the hatchway and see what was going on in the revival room. Regretfully, he decided that wasn’t a good idea. Everybody in there would be desperately trying to resuscitate the Doctor. As soon as anyone noticed him rubbernecking, they’d all scream at him to get the hell out of there.

“If the Doctor doesn’t make it,” Johnson said slowly, “who the hell dickers with the Lizards?”

“I haven’t studied the whole passenger list,” Sam said. “Besides, who knows how many people got important between the time when I went under and when the Admiral Peary took off?”

“Yeah, same goes for me,” the pilot said. “They put me in cold sleep after you, but before that I was as far away from everything that was happening on Earth as you could be if you weren’t on a starship.”

The only human-well, sort of human-on a starship before us was Kassquit, Sam thought. He hadn’t been surprised to find out she was here. It made sense for the Race to have their best experts on Big Uglies help deal with the wild ones. And who knew more about humans than somebody who biologically was one?

Dr. Blanchard came floating up into the control room. One look at her face told Sam all he needed to know. Back when he was a minor-league baseball player, he’d worn that same expression after grounding into a game-ending double play with the tying run at third. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“We did everything we knew how to do.” Dr. Blanchard might have been trying to convince herself as well as Yeager. “We did everything we knew how to do, but his heart just wouldn’t get going. Hard to revive a man if you can’t give him a heartbeat.”

“Cool him down again, then?” Sam asked. “Maybe they’ll have better techniques when we get back to Earth.” If we ever get back to Earth.

“Kaplan and Garvey are doing that,” Blanchard said. “I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, though. If we can’t revive him, he’s probably been dead-dead in slow motion, but dead-for a long time.”

“Dead in slow motion. There’s a hell of a phrase,” Glen Johnson said. “Reminds me of my ex-wife.” By the way Dr. Blanchard laughed, she might have had an ex-husband to be reminded of. But then Johnson’s face clouded. “She’s dead for real now. Everybody I knew back on Earth is probably dead now.”

“I’ve got two grandsons,” Sam said. “They were little boys when I went under. They’re middle-aged now-hell, if you’re not talking about clock time, they’re older than their dad and mom. I wonder if they remember me at all. Maybe a little.”

“Most of the people here don’t have a lot of ties back home,” Blanchard said. “I’ve got cousins and nieces and nephews there, but nobody I was real close to. Some of them are bound to be around now. But when we get back again?” She spread her hands and shook her head. “Cold sleep’s a funny business.”

“The Lizards have a whole little subsociety, I guess you’d call it, of males and females who spend a lot of time in cold sleep,” Sam said. “They keep one another company, because they’re the only ones who know what it’s like being cut off that way from the time they were hatched in. And they live longer than we do, and they’ve got faster starships, and their culture doesn’t change as fast as ours.”

“So you think we’ll do the same?” Johnson asked.

“You bet I do,” Sam said. “You ever see Joe DiMaggio play?”

“Sure.” The pilot nodded. “In Cleveland. I may even have seen you once or twice. I used to go to bush-league games now and then.”

“Thanks a lot,” Yeager said without rancor. “Forget about me. Remember DiMaggio. Suppose we come back in 2070-something and you start going on about Joltin’ Joe. Who’s going to know what you’re talking about, or if you’re talking through your hat? Nobody except a guy who’s spent a lot of years on ice.”

“I never saw DiMaggio play,” said Melanie Blanchard, who looked to be in her mid-forties. “He retired about the time I was born.”

“You at least know about him, though,” Sam said. “By the time we get home, he’ll be ancient history.” They went on talking about it, none of them getting too excited. It hurt less than talking about losing the Doctor would have.

The next three revivals went well, which helped make people feel better about things. Then Sam got summoned to the commandant’s quarters. He hadn’t had much to do with Lieutenant General Healey, and hadn’t wanted much to do with him, either. Healey was Army through and through, even more so than Stone. Sam wasn’t, and doubted very much whether the commandant approved of him.

Approve or not, General Healey was polite enough, waving Sam to a chair and waiting till he’d buckled himself in. He owned a round bulldog face and eyebrows that seemed to have a life of their own. They twitched now: twitched unhappily, if Sam was any judge. The commandant said, “We have communicated our unfortunate failure to revive the Doctor to the Race.”

“Yes, sir.” Sam nodded. “Unfortunate is right, but you had to do it.”

“Their response was… unexpected.” Healey looked unhappier yet.

“Yes, sir,” Sam repeated; that was always safe. “Do you need my advice about whatever it was they said?”

“In a manner of speaking, but only in a manner of speaking,” Healey replied. “They were disturbed to learn they would not be negotiating with the Doctor. Everything they had heard about him from Earth was favorable.”

“I can see how it would have been,” Sam said.

“There is one other person aboard this ship about whom they said the same thing,” Healey went on, each word seeming to taste worse than the one before. “In the Doctor’s absence, they insist that we negotiate through you, Colonel.”

“Me?” Sam yelped. “I’m no striped-pants diplomat. I’m a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.”

“Not any more, you’re not,” Lieutenant General Healey said grimly. “They don’t want anything to do with anybody else. We’re in no position to make demands here, unfortunately. They are. As of now, Colonel, the fate of mankind may well ride on your shoulders. Congratulations, if that’s the word I want.”

“Jesus Christ!” Sam said. And that wasn’t half of what they’d say back in the USA more than ten years from now when speed-of-light radio told them what had happened. The fate of mankind on my shoulders? He wished he’d never heard of science fiction in his life.

“Is this the Tosevite ship Admiral Peary? Do you read me, Admiral Peary?” The shuttlecraft pilot on the other end of the line made a mess of the U.S. starship’s name. Glen Johnson didn’t suppose he could have expected anything different.

“That is correct, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” he answered in the language of the Race. “I have you on radar. Your trajectory matches the course reported to me. You may proceed to docking. Our docking collar is produced to match those manufactured by the Race.”

“Of course it is,” Mickey Flynn interjected in English. “We stole the design from them.”

“Hush,” Johnson said, also in English. “It’s useful to have parts that fit together no matter who made ’em. That’s why most railroads have the same gauge.”

“I am proceeding.” The shuttlecraft pilot sounded dubious. “I hope you have the same high standards as the Race.”

Humanity didn’t. Johnson knew it. He was damned if he’d admit as much here. He said, “We crossed the space between the star Tosev and your sun. We have arrived safely. That must say something about our capabilities.”

“Something, yes,” the shuttlecraft pilot replied. “It may well also say something about your foolhardiness.”

So there, Johnson thought. Had he been crazy to come aboard the Admiral Peary? Maybe not, but it sure hadn’t hurt. He watched the shuttlecraft’s approach, first on the radar screen and then with the Mark One eyeball. After a little while, he keyed the radio again. “You can fly that thing, I will say. I have flown in-atmosphere aircraft and craft not too different from that one. I know what I am talking about.”

“I thank you for the compliment,” the shuttlecraft pilot replied. “If I were not capable, would they have chosen me for this mission?”

“I don’t know. You never can tell,” Johnson said, but in English and without transmitting the words. Flynn let out what sounded suspiciously like a snort.

The pilot docked with the shuttlecraft. To Johnson’s relief, the docking collar worked exactly the way it was supposed to. He went down to the corridor outside the air lock to say good-bye to the Yeagers and the others who were going down to the surface of Home.

“I’m jealous,” he told Sam Yeager once more. “If I could take one gee’s worth of gravity after going without for so long…”

“A likely story,” Yeager said. “No girls to chase down there, and the weather’s always hot. You’d do better staying here.”

Lights on the wall showed that the outer airlock door was opening and the shuttlecraft pilot was moving his ship into the lock. The Race had wanted to inspect people’s baggage before they went down to the surface of Home. Sam Yeager had said no. The Lizards didn’t seem worried about weapons, at least not in the usual sense of the word. They were worried about ginger.

Just how worried they were, Johnson discovered when Karen Yeager, who was looking through the window set into the inner airlock door, squeaked in surprise. “It’s not a Lizard!” she exclaimed. “It’s a Rabotev.”

That set everybody pushing off toward the window, trying to get a first look at one of the other two races in the Empire. Johnson’s weightlessness-weakened muscles were at a disadvantage there, but he eventually got a turn. The Rabotev-what amazing news! — looked like the pictures the Lizards had brought to Earth.

It was a little taller, a little skinnier, a little straighter than a Lizard. Its scales were bigger and looked thicker than a Lizard‘s. They were a gray close to black, not a greenish brown. On its chest, the Rabotev wore a shuttlecraft pilot’s body paint. Its hands were strange. They had four digits each; the outer two were both set at an angle from the middle two, and could both work as thumbs. Two digits on its feet pointed forward, two to the rear.

The Rabotev’s head was a little more erect on its neck than a Lizard‘s, less so than a man‘s. It had its eyes mounted atop short, muscular stalks, not in eye turrets. They moved all the time; sometimes, it seemed, independently of each other. Johnson wondered if the shuttlecraft pilot had a snail somewhere way up his-her? — family tree. The Rabotev’s snout was shorter than a Lizard‘s. When the alien opened its-that did seem the safest pronoun, in the absence of visible evidence one way or the other-mouth, it displayed a lot of sharp, yellow-orange teeth.

Sam Yeager said what Johnson had already thought: “They probably don’t have to worry about getting this one high on ginger. Odds are it doesn’t do anything for him.”

“Would you let him in, Colonel Johnson?” Karen Yeager asked. “This is a first contact, in a way.”

“Okay,” Johnson said, and opened the inner airlock door. “I greet you,” he called to the Rabotev in the language of the Race. “I am the pilot with whom you were speaking on the radio.” He gave his name.

“I am Raatiil,” the Rabotev said, pronouncing each vowel separately. “And I greet you.” He sounded like a Lizard; try as Johnson would, he couldn’t detect any distinctive accent, the way he could when a human spoke the Lizards’ language. “You are the first Tosevites I have ever seen.” His eyestalks wiggled. They weren’t long enough to tie in knots, which was probably a good thing.

“You are the first Rabotev any Tosevite has ever seen in person,” Sam Yeager said. “We recognize you, of course, from pictures, but none of your kind has come to Tosev 3.”

“Some are on the way now, I believe, in cold sleep,” Raatiil said.

Johnson wondered if the Race hadn’t used Rabotevs and Hallessi in the conquest fleet because it feared they might be unreliable. He doubted he would get a straight answer if he asked the question that way. Instead, he inquired, “What do you think of the Race?”

“They took us out of barbarism,” the shuttlecraft pilot said simply. “They gave us the freedom of the stars. They cured diseases on our home planet. We are never hungry any more, the way we used to be. And the spirits of Emperors past watch over those of our folk, the same as they watch over those of the Race.” The Rabotev’s eyestalks set its large green eyes staring at its own feet for a moment.

Raatiil sounded altogether sincere. If it was, there went any chance of even thinking about raising rebellions in the subject species. Johnson had always figured that chance was pretty slim. The Lizards had held the Empire together for a long time.

Jonathan Yeager asked, “What did your people used to reverence before the Race came to your planet?”

Raatiil opened and closed both hands. That must have been the Rabotev’s equivalent of a shrug, for the alien answered, “These days, only scholars know. What difference does it make? Those other things could not have been as strong as the spirits of Emperors past, or we would have learned to fly between the stars and brought the Race into our empire instead of the other way round.”

Was that what the Lizards had been teaching ever since they conquered what humans called Epsilon Eridani 2? Or had the Rabotevs come up with it themselves, to explain why they’d lost and the Lizards had won? After all these thousands of years, did anyone still remember how the story had got started?

“May I ask a question without causing offense?” Sam Yeager said. “As I told you, I am ignorant of your kind.”

Raatiil made the affirmative gesture. With the Rabotev’s two-thumbed hand, it looked odd, but it was understandable. “Ask,” the shuttlecraft pilot said.

“I thank you,” Yeager replied. “Are you male or female?”

“They predicted you would ask me this,” Raatiil said. “As it happens, I am a male. The sand in which my egg was incubated was warm. But, except during mating season, it matters not at all to us. I am told it is different with you Tosevites, and I see this is so.”

In English, Johnson said, “They’ve been studying up on us.”

“Well, good,” Jonathan Yeager replied in the same language. “I hope that means they take us seriously.”

“Oh, they take us seriously, all right,” Sam Yeager said. “We’re here, so they have to take us seriously. Whether we can get anywhere when we talk to them-well, that’s liable to be a different story.”

The Rabotev’s eyestalks kept swinging toward whoever was talking. Does he understand English? Johnson wondered. Or is he just surprised to hear any language that isn’t the Race‘s? The Race was nothing if not thoroughgoing. Signals from Earth had been coming Home for almost eighty years now. Could the Lizards have taught some of the folk of the Empire the human tongue? No doubt about it.

Easiest way to find out might be to grab the bull by the horns. “Do you speak English, Shuttlecraft Pilot?” Johnson asked, in that language.

Raatiil froze for a moment. Surprise? Evidently, for after that freeze he made the affirmative gesture again. “I have learned it,” he answered, also in English. “Do you understand when I speak?”

“Yes. You speak well,” Johnson said. That Raatiil could be understood at all meant he spoke well, but Johnson had known plenty of Lizards who were worse. Still in an experimental mood, he told that to the Rabotev.

He got back another shrug-equivalent. “Some males and females are better than others at learning strange things,” Raatiil said.

So much for that, Johnson thought. He’d been curious to see whether Raatiil enjoyed getting praise for doing something better than members of the Race. If he did, he didn’t show it. Maybe that meant there really wasn’t any friction among the different species in the Empire. Maybe it only meant Raatiil was too well trained to show much.

Sam Yeager caught Johnson’s eye and nodded slightly. Johnson nodded back. Sure as hell, Sam had known what he was up to. No flies on him, no indeed. Everybody on the ship had been gloomy because the Doctor didn’t make it. Johnson was sorry they couldn’t revive the Doctor, too. He didn’t think the diplomacy would suffer on that account, though. It might even go better. The Doctor was clever, but he’d always liked to show off just how clever he was. Sam Yeager was more likely to do what needed doing and not make any kind of fuss about it.

Raatiil said, “Those Tosevites going down to the surface of Home, please accompany me to the shuttlecraft. It has been fitted with pads that will accommodate your physiques.”

One by one, the humans boarded the shuttlecraft. Sam Yeager was the last. “Wish us luck,” he told Johnson.

“Break a leg,” Johnson said solemnly. Yeager grinned and pushed himself into the air lock.

Johnson closed the inner door. Yeager went through the outer door and into the shuttlecraft. Johnson pressed the button that closed the outer door. He waited by the air lock to make sure the shuttlecraft’s docking collar disengaged as smoothly as it had caught. It did. He headed back to the control room. From now on, most of the action would be down on the planet.

Deceleration pressed Jonathan Yeager into the foam pad that did duty for a seat on the Lizards’ shuttlecraft. Rationally, he knew it wasn’t that bad, but it felt as if he were at the bottom of a pileup on a football field.

He looked over his shoulder at his father, who was older and had been weightless longer. “How you doing, Dad?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine as soon as they take the locomotive off my chest,” Sam Yeager answered.

“Landing soon,” Raatiil said-in English. He’d never seen a human before in his life, but he spoke fairly well. Would he have admitted it if the pilot hadn’t asked? There was an interesting question.

The shuttlecraft touched down. The landing jets fell silent. It was already hot inside the craft. The Lizards liked it that way; they were comfortable at temperatures like those of a hot summer day in Los Angeles. They found Arabia and the Sahara delightful. They also found them temperate, an alarming thought. Jonathan asked, “What season of the year is it here?”

“Spring,” Raatiil answered. “But do not worry. It will be warmer soon.” That spoke volumes about the kind of weather Rabotevs preferred.

It also drew several involuntary groans from the humans on the shuttlecraft. Karen Yeager said, “Our world is cooler than Home. I hope you will arrange to cool our quarters.”

“I do not know anything about this,” Raatiil said. “Now that you remind me, I remember in my briefing that Tosevites prefer weather we would find unpleasantly cold. But I have no control over your quarters.”

It’s not my job. That was what he meant, all right. Some things didn’t change across species lines. Jonathan had seen that back on Earth with the Lizards. It obviously applied here, too. Then Raatiil opened the hatchway, and Jonathan forgot about everything but that he’d momentarily be stepping out onto the ground of a planet that spun round another sun.

“You Tosevites may go down,” Raatiil said. “The descent ladder is deployed. Go with some caution, if you please. The ladder is not made for your species.”

“Many of us have flown in the Race’s shuttlecraft on Tosev 3,” Jonathan said. “We know these ladders.”

The air inside the shuttlecraft had had the same sterile feel to it as it did aboard human spacecraft. It had smelled very faintly of lubricants and other less decipherable things. Now Jonathan got a whiff of dust and spicy scents that could only have come from plants of some sort. That was a world out there waiting for him, not the inside of a spacecraft.

For a moment, none of the half dozen humans moved. Raatiil’s eye-stalks swung from one to the other. He plainly wondered why they held back. Then Karen reached out and touched Jonathan’s father on the shoulder. “Go ahead,” she told him. “You’ve got the right. You’ve been dealing with the Race longer than anybody.”

The other three humans-another husband-and-wife team, Tom and Linda de la Rosa, and a military man, Major Frank Coffey-were all younger than Jonathan and Karen. Nobody aboard except Sam Yeager (and maybe Raatiil: who could say how long Rabotevs lived?) had been around when the Race came to Earth.

“Yes, go ahead, Colonel Yeager,” Linda de la Rosa said. She was blond and a little plump; her husband had a beak of a nose and a fierce black mustache. He nodded. So did Major Coffey, who was the color of coffee with not too much cream.

“Thank you all,” Jonathan’s father said. “You don’t know what this means to me.” His voice was husky. He hadn’t sounded like that since Jonathan’s mother died. He awkwardly climbed over Frank Coffey, who lay closest to the hatch, and started down. Then he paused and started to laugh. “I only get half credit for this,” he observed. “Kassquit’s been here before me.”

“You do get that, though, because she’s only half human,” Karen said. She was right. If anything, Kassquit might have been less than half human. But Jonathan wished his wife wouldn’t have had that edge in her voice.

Out went Jonathan’s father. The others followed. Jonathan went after Major Coffey. He’d just stuck his head out of the hatch when his father stepped down onto the flame-scarred concrete of the shuttlecraft field. In English, Sam Yeager said, “This is for everyone who saw it coming before it happened.”

How long would people remember that? Jonathan liked it better than something on the order of, I claim this land in the names of the King and Queen of Spain. And it included not only all the scientists and engineers who’d built the Admiral Peary, but also his father’s science-fiction writers, who’d imagined travel between the stars before the Lizards came.

If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t be here, Jonathan thought. Here wasn’t just Home. As his father had said, if he hadn’t got involved with Lizard POWs, he never would have met his mom. Jonathan shied away from that thought. He didn’t like contemplating the strings of chance that held everyday life together.

Somebody swatted him on the fanny. “Don’t stay there gawking,” Karen said from behind him. “The rest of us want to come out, too.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. He hadn’t been gawking, only woolgathering. He didn’t think his wife would care about the difference. The descent ladder was narrow, the rungs too close together and oddly sloped for human feet. He went down slowly, then descended next to his father and Coffey.

“Looks like an airport back home,” the major remarked. “All this wide open space in the middle of a city.”

“I’d want plenty of wide open space around me, too, in case one of those shuttlecraft came down where it didn’t belong,” Sam Yeager said.

“That doesn’t happen to the Lizards very often,” Jonathan said. “They engineer better than we do. Of course, just once would ruin your whole day.”

Off in the distance, beyond the concrete, buildings rose. Most of them were utilitarian boxes. Jonathan wondered how many different styles of architecture this city held. How old were the oldest buildings? Older than the Pyramids? He wouldn’t have been surprised.

Across the concrete came a flat, open vehicle crowded with Lizards. It stopped about twenty feet away from the humans. Two of the Lizards descended from it and strode toward the shuttlecraft. “Which of you Tosevites is Sam Yeager?” asked the one with the more ornate body paint. Jonathan’s eyes widened as he recognized a fleetlord’s markings. Was that…?

His father stepped forward. “I am. I greet you, Fleetlord. You are Atvar, is it not so?”

“You are to call him Exalted Fleetlord,” Raatiil said.

“Yes, I am Atvar.” The male who had commanded the conquest fleet sent the negative hand gesture toward the Rabotev shuttlecraft pilot. “The Tosevite is correct to address me as he does. As an ambassador, he outranks a fleetlord.” He turned back to Jonathan’s father. “In the name of the Emperor, superior Tosevite, I greet you.” He and the male with him bent into the posture of respect.

After moving down at the mention of the Emperor’s name, Raatiil’s eyestalks swung toward Sam Yeager. Jonathan had first met the Rabotev only a little while before, but he knew astonishment when he saw it. He was all but reading Raatiil’s mind. They’re making this much fuss over a Big Ugly?

Atvar went on, “My associate here is Senior Researcher Ttomalss. Some of you Tosevites will have made his acquaintance on your planet.”

“Oh, yes,” Jonathan’s father said. He introduced Jonathan and Karen, Frank Coffey, and the de la Rosas.

“One of you Tosevites, at least, will be easy to discriminate from the others,” Atvar remarked, his eye turrets on the black man.

“Truth,” Coffey said. “No one on Tosev 3 ever had any trouble with that.” He owned a dangerously good deadpan. Jonathan had all he could do not to laugh out loud. Beside him, Karen let out a strangled snort.

“Indeed, I believe I have met all of you Tosevites at one time or another,” Ttomalss said. “And you Yeagers performed an experiment that is an outrage to the Race.”

“You would be in a better position to complain about it if you had not performed the same experiment with a Tosevite hatchling,” Jonathan answered. “And how is Kassquit these days?”

“She is well. She is still as stubbornly opinionated as ever,” the Lizard psychologist answered. “You will see her shortly. Since you have come to Home, we thought this first greeting would appropriately come from the Race alone.”

Jonathan wondered how Kassquit had taken that. Not well, if he had to guess. She’d never quite learned how to be a human, and she’d never quite been accepted by the Race, either. Neither fish nor fowl, Jonathan thought. All things considered, it was a miracle she wasn’t crazier than she was.

His father said, “Would it be possible for us to get in out of the sun?”

That plainly surprised the Lizards. For them, the weather was no doubt springlike. For Jonathan, the only place that had springtime like this was hell. Ttomalss said something in a low voice to Atvar. The fleetlord made the affirmative gesture, saying, “As we were always cold on Tosev 3, so you may find yourselves warm here. I should warn you, though, that you will not find it any cooler within.”

“We understand that,” Sam Yeager said. “At least we will be out of this bright sunlight, though.”

“I hope so,” Karen murmured in English. “Otherwise, they’ll see a red human along with a black one.” With her fair redhead’s skin, she burned with the greatest of ease.

She did on Earth, anyhow. “Tau Ceti’s redder than the sun,” Jonathan reminded her. “It puts out less ultraviolet. The Lizards can’t even see violet-it looks black to them.”

“I know, I know,” his wife answered. “But any ultraviolet at all is enough to do me in right now. I forgot to put on sunscreen before we came down.”

Atvar gestured toward the vehicle. “Join us, then, and we will take you to the terminal, where we will inspect your baggage.”

“I have already had this discussion with the Race,” Sam Yeager said. “The answer is still no.”

“You confuse me,” Atvar said. “First you want to go in, and then you do not.”

“Going in is fine,” Jonathan’s father said. “Inspecting baggage is not. We are a diplomatic party. We have the same rights as if we were back in our own not-empire. You must know this, Fleetlord.”

“And if I do?” Atvar said. “If I do not like it?”

“You can expel us,” Sam Yeager said. “You can send us back to the Admiral Peary. I think that would be foolish, but you can do it.”

“How do I know your cases of possessions are not full of the herb that causes so much trouble for us?” Atvar demanded.

“You do not know that. But you do know your own folk must smuggle more of the herb than a few Big Uglies could. And I tell you that we have none of it with us here. Will you trust me, or will you not?”

“You I will trust,” Atvar said heavily. “I would not trust any other Tosevite who made this assertion, not even the Doctor. Come, then, and we shall see what we have to say to one another.”

Kassquit waited inside the terminal at the shuttlecraft port, along with a small swarm of middle-ranking functionaries from the Race. When she looked out the window, she could see the shuttlecraft that had descended from the Tosevite starship. She could even see the wild Big Uglies who had come down from it.

As wild Big Uglies were in the habit of doing, these wore cloth wrappings and foot coverings. The wrappings were minimal, leaving arms and legs mostly bare, but she wondered why the Tosevites wore anything in this climate. She looked down at her own body, nude except for her body paint and the foot coverings she too used. Her soles were softer than those of the Race, and often needed protection.

Which Tosevite out there was Jonathan Yeager? She saw only one who shaved his hair, but that didn’t necessarily prove anything. He might have stopped shaving, as she had done, and some other Tosevite might follow the practice. At this distance, it was hard to be sure.

And which wild Big Ugly was Jonathan Yeager’s permanent mate? There, Kassquit had no trouble finding an answer. That female had copper-colored hair, and only one of the Tosevites fit the bill. Kassquit’s nearly motionless face would have scowled if only it could. She knew her resentment was irrational, but that made it no less real.

The Big Uglies outside boarded the passenger-mover that normally ferried elderly and disabled males and females around the shuttleport. It had been adapted to Tosevite needs with special seats. Kassquit had been the model on which those were formed. What fit her back and fundament, so different from those of the Race, should also accommodate other Big Uglies.

The passenger-mover came back to the terminal building. A door opened. A male with a cart went out to take charge of the Big Uglies’ baggage. The cases he brought back were larger than those members of the Race would have used. Of course, members of the Race didn’t take extra sets of wrappings with them wherever they went.

In came the baggage handler. In came Ttomalss and Fleetlord Atvar. And in came the wild Big Uglies. As soon as they got inside the building, someone aimed televisor lights at them. Half a dozen reporters thrust microphones at them and shouted questions. Some of the questions were idiotic. The rest were a great deal stupider than that.

“How do you like Home?” a female yelled, over and over.

“Fine, so far. A little warm,” said the Big Ugly with the shaved head. That was Jonathan Yeager; Kassquit recognized his voice. He caught her eye and nodded, a very Tosevite style of greeting.

“Do you understand me?” another reporter shouted, as if doubting that a Big Ugly could speak the Race’s language.

“No, of course not,” the white-haired Tosevite replied. “If I understood you, I would answer your question, and I am obviously not doing that.”

Kassquit recognized not only Sam Yeager’s voice but also his offbeat slant on things. The reporter, by contrast, seemed to have no idea what to make of the answer. “Back to you in the studio,” the female said, looking for help wherever she could find it.

Another reporter asked, “Will it be peace or war?”

Had someone asked that of Sam Yeager in private, he would have said something like, Probably. But, while it was a foolish question, it wasn’t one where a joke was fitting in public. He said, “We always hope for peace. We have lived in peace with the Race on Tosev 3 for most of the time since you first came there. Now that we too can fly between the stars, that seems to me to be one more reason for each side to treat the other as an equal.”

“You sound so… so civilized,” the reporter said.

“I thank you. So do you,” Sam Yeager said.

That reporter went off in confusion. Kassquit’s mouth fell open in the silent laugh the Race used. One of the noisier kind Tosevites favored almost escaped her. If Sam Yeager kept this up, he would clear the terminal building of fools in short order. And if his methods could be more widely applied, that might have a salutary effect on the Race, or at least on how it did business.

None of the reporters or cameramales and — females wore false hair and wrappings. Those had jolted Kassquit when she first saw them. They seemed as strange to her as the first shaven-headed Big Uglies with body paint must have seemed to the Race back on Tosev 3.

Ttomalss beckoned and called out something. In the noisy chaos inside the terminal, Kassquit couldn’t make out what he said, but she thought he was beckoning to her. She pointed to herself. He made the affirmative gesture. She pushed forward through the crowd.

Males and females grumbled as she went by them, then got out of the way in a hurry when they saw who and what she was. That even applied to a female in the body paint of a police officer who was holding back the crowd. As she stepped inside, the female asked, “Why are you not already with them?”

“Because I am a citizen of the Empire, not a wild Big Ugly,” Kassquit answered proudly. She went on up to Ttomalss. “I greet you, superior sir.” To Atvar, she added, “And I greet you, Exalted Fleetlord.”

“I greet you,” the two males said together. Ttomalss went on to present her to the wild Big Uglies.

“I greet you,” Sam Yeager said. “It is good to see you again. We have both spent a lot of time on ice.”

“Truth,” Kassquit said after a moment’s pause to figure out the idiom, which did not belong naturally to the Race’s language. “Yes, indeed. Truth.” She glanced toward Ttomalss. The Race had kept her on ice till it needed her here.

“And I greet you,” the male named Frank Coffey said. “I have heard much about you. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“I thank you. The pleasure is mine,” Kassquit said. She studied him with interest. She had never met a member of the black race of Big Uglies in person till now. Coffey spoke the Race’s language well enough, if less fluently than Sam Yeager.

Back in the days when the conquest fleet was still trying to bring all of Tosev 3 into the Empire, the Race had tried to use black Big Uglies in the not-empire of the United States against the pinkish Big Uglies who often oppressed them. The strategy had failed, for too many of the dark Tosevites had feigned loyalty to the Race only to betray it. Coffey would not have been hatched at that time, but he was plainly loyal to the regime of the United States. Were he not, he never would have been chosen for this mission.

Thinking about him helped keep Kassquit from thinking about Jonathan Yeager, who was standing beside him. “I greet you,” Jonathan said. “I hope you have been well, and I hope you have been happy.”

“I have been well,” Kassquit said. Happy? She didn’t want to think about that. She doubted she could be happy, caught as she was between her biology and her culture. She did not know how to be a Tosevite, and she could never be the female of the Race she wished she were.

Jonathan Yeager said, “I present to you my mate, Karen Yeager.”

“I greet you,” Kassquit said, as politely as she could. She was as jealous of the copper-haired Big Ugly as she was of females of the Race. Karen Yeager could live a life normal for her species. That was something Kassquit would never know.

“And I greet you,” Karen Yeager said. “Forgive me, but it is customary for Tosevites to wear some form of wrapping.”

“This is Home,” Kassquit said sharply. “Here, the customs of the Race prevail. If you want to wrap yourself, that is your business. If you expect me to do so, you ask too much.”

Several of the wild Big Uglies spoke to Karen Yeager in their own language. Kassquit had learned to read Tosevite facial expressions, even if she did not form them herself. Jonathan Yeager’s mate did not look happy. Jonathan Yeager himself did not take part in the discussion in English.

In a low voice, Ttomalss said, “Remember, being without wrappings is often a sexual cue among the wild Big Uglies. The other female thinks you are making a mating display in front of her nominally exclusive mate.”

“Ah.” Kassquit bent into the posture of respect, which was itself derived from the Race’s mating posture. “I believe you are right, superior sir.”

Greetings from the de la Rosas followed. The female of that mated pair made no comments about what Kassquit was or wasn’t wearing. Kassquit thought that wise on her part.

Ttomalss said, “And is the female named Karen Yeager correct in having such concerns?”

Kassquit didn’t answer right away. She had to look inside herself for the truth. “Perhaps, from her point of view,” she admitted unhappily.

“We do not want to provoke the Tosevites,” Ttomalss said. “Any matings or attempts at matings leading to such provocation are discouraged in the strongest possible terms. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, superior sir. I understand it very well,” Kassquit said.

She did her best to keep her voice impassive, but her best wasn’t good enough. Ttomalss, after all, had known her since she was a hatchling. He asked, “Do you not only understand but agree to it?”

“Yes, superior sir,” she said again. She knew she sounded sulky, but she couldn’t help it.

“This is important, Kassquit.” Ttomalss used a soft emphatic cough.

“I said I understood and agreed,” Kassquit answered. “If you do not believe me, remove me from the diplomatic team.”

Challenged, Ttomalss retreated. “I do not wish to do that. Nor does Fleetlord Atvar. Your insights will be invaluable-provided you do not let emotional involvement color them.”

“I would have thought my insights would be valuable precisely because I am capable of emotional as well as intellectual involvement with Big Uglies,” Kassquit said.

Ttomalss waved that away, which could only mean he had no good answer for it. Fleetlord Atvar was saying, “We will convey you Tosevites to a residence that has been set aside for you. We have made efforts to ensure that it is as comfortable as possible for your species.”

“I thank you,” Sam Yeager replied. “Will our rooms have air coolers? It must be around forty hundredths here, and we prefer a temperature closer to twenty-five.”

“I am not familiar with all the details,” Atvar said. “Believe me, though-I know Tosev 3 is a cooler world than Home.”

“Yes, Fleetlord, I am sure you do,” the white-haired American Big Ugly said. “But does the same also hold true for the males and females here who have never visited our world?”

Kassquit was sure that was a good question. The Race had been traveling between the stars for thousands upon thousands of years. In some ways, though, it was more parochial than Big Uglies were. They’d had to deal with differences much more than it had. She sighed. She was a difference, and the Race had trouble dealing with her.